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the seaboard and on the frontiers. A gallant navy protects our commerce, which spreads its banners on every sea, and extends its enterprize to every clime. Our diplomatic relations connect us on terms of equality and honest friendship with the chief powers of the world; while we avoid entangling participation in their intrigues, their passions, and their wars. Our national resources are developed by an earnest culture of the arts of peace. Every man enjoys the fruits of his industry; every mind is free to publish its convictions. Our government, by its organization, is necessarily identified with the interests of the people, and relies exclusively on their attachment for its durability and support. Even the enemies of the state, if there are any among us, have liberty to express themselves undisturbed; and are safely tolerated, where reason is left free to combat their errors. Nor is the constitution a dead letter, unalterably fixed; it has the capacity for improvement, receiving into itself whatever changes time and the public will may require; and is safe from decay, so long as that will retains its energy. New states are forming in the wilderness; canals, intersecting our plains and crossing our highlands, open numerous channels to internal commerce; manufactures prosper along our watercourses; the use of steam on our rivers and railroads annihilates distance by the acceleration of speed. Our wealth and population, already giving us a place in the first rank of nations, are so rapidly cumulative, that the former is increased four-fold, and the latter is doubled, in every period of twenty-two or twenty

INTRODUCTION.

three years. There is no national debt; the community is opulent; the government economical; and the public treasury full. Religion, neither persecuted nor paid by the state, is sustained by the regard for public morals, and the convictions of an enlightened faith. Intelligence is diffused with unparalleled universality; a free press teems with the choicest productions of all nations and ages. There are more daily journals in the United States than in the world beside. A public document of general interest is, within a month, reproduced in at least a million of copies, and is brought within the reach of every individual in the country. An immense concourse of emigrants of the most various lineage is perpetually crowding to our shores; and the principles of liberty, uniting all-interests by the operation of equal laws, blend the discordant elements into harmonious union.

Other governments are convulsed by the innovations and reforms of neighboring states; our constitution, fixed in the affections of the people, from whose choice it has sprung, neutralizes the influence of foreign principles, and fearlessly opens an asylum to the virtuous, the unfortunate, and the oppressed of every nation.

And yet it is but little more than two centuries, since the oldest of our states received its first permanent colony. Before that time the whole territory was an unproductive waste. Throughout its wide extent the arts had not erected a monument. Its only inhabitants were a few scattered tribes of feeble barbarians, destitute of commerce, of political con

3

nexion, and of morals. The axe and the ploughshare were unknown. The soil, which had been gathering fertility from the repose of centuries, was lavishing its strength in magnificent but useless vegetation. In the view of civilization the immense domain was a solitude.

It is the object of the present work to explain, how the change in the condition of our land has been accomplished; and, as the fortunes of a nation are not controlled by blind destiny, to follow the steps, by which a favoring Providence, calling our institutions into being, has conducted the country to its present happiness and glory.

PART I.

COLONIAL

HISTORY.

CHAPTER I.

EARLY VOYAGES. FRENCH SETTLEMENTS.

I.

1492.

THE enterprize of Columbus, the most memora- CHAP. ble maritime enterprize in the history of the world, formed between Europe and America the communication which will never cease. The national pride of an Icelandic historian' has indeed claimed for his ancestors the glory of having discovered the western hemisphere. It is said, that they passed 1000, from their own island to Greenland, and were driven by adverse winds from Greenland to the 1003. shores of Labrador; that the voyage was often repeated; that the coasts of America were extensively

1 Thormoder Thorfæus, Historia Winlandiæ Antiquæ ; printed at Copenhagen, 1705. Compare Crantz's History of Greenland, b. iv. c. i. sec. 7. Robertson's History of America: Notes and Illustrations: Note xvii.

Of American authors, consult Wheaton's History of the Northmen, p. 22-28; Belknap's Am. Biography, v. i. p. 47-58; Yates and Moulton's History of the State

of New-York, Part i. p. 110-125;
Irving's Life of Columbus, first
edition, v. iii. p. 292–300.

These writers, with the excep-
tion of Irving, favor the opinion,
that the Icelanders reached Amer-
ica. Thorfæus has been consult-
ed quite as often as Sturleson,
the original historian, whose work
contains the tradition. Franklin's
opinion is given but casually in a
private letter. Works, v. vi. p. 102.

or

I.

CHAP. explored,' and colonies established on the shores of Nova Scotia or Newfoundland. It is even suggested, 1492. that these early adventurers anchored near the harbor of Boston; or in the bays of New-Jersey. But this belief rests only on a narrative,5 traditional in its form and obscure in its meaning, although of undoubted antiquity. The geographical details are so vague, that they cannot even sustain a conjecture; the accounts of the mildness of the winter and the fertility of nature in the climes which were visited, are, on any hypothesis, fictitious or exaggerated; while the remark, which should define the length of the shortest winter's day, has received interpretations to suit every latitude from New-York to Cape Farewell. The first discoveries in Greenland were in a high northern latitude; Vinland was but another and more southern portion of the same extensive territory.

Imagination had conceived the idea, that vast inhabited regions lay unexplored in the west; and

1 Moulton's New-York, p. 115.
2 Belknap's American Biogra-
phy, v. i. p. 52–56.

3 Wheaton's History of the
Northmen, p. 24.

4 Moulton's New-York, p. 115, 116.

5 See the original Icelandic Saga itself, collated from several manuscripts, and printed with a translation into Danish and Latin, in Gerhard Schöning's edition of Historia Regum Norvegicorum, conscripta a Snorrio Sturla Filio, v. i. p. 304-325. Copenhagen, 1777, in folio.

6 On Snorre Sturleson, see Wheaton's Northmen, p.100-109. 7 Historia Reg. Norv. v. i. p. 309. Sól hafdi par eyktar stad oc dagmála stad, um skamm-degi.

8 Schöning in Hist. Norv. v. i. p. 309, says nine hours; Thorfæus, p. 7, and in the Addenda, p. 2, suits his exposition to the latitude of Newfoundland, and allows eight hours; Pontoppidan (see Belknap's Biog. v. i. p. 52,) reduces the day to six.

9 This opinion is forced upon me by a perusal of the Saga itself in the Latin version. I find it confirmed in a recent publicationDiscovery and Adventures in the Polar Seas and Regions, by Leslie, Jameson, and Murray, p. 87 of the New-York edition of 1832. He that would learn a lesson of historical scepticism, should compare the narrative of Sturleson with the glowing and confident commentary in Moulton.

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